Over the years there have been many movies about traveling in space, but nothing like the new movie Passengers, that stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. I thought that the idea behind this movie was a great one. Just have two characters in the majority of the entire film, traveling in space at 1/2 the speed of light on a trip inside a huge spaceship that will take them 120 years to reach their destination. I believe that 500 or 1000 years from now we will have the technology to travel the universe like this but it will most likely always be impossible to ever travel at or faster than the speed of light. This restriction means that wherever humanity wants to travel to, it is going to take a very long time to get where we want to go. This basic law of physics will make it mandatory that people who travel for many years in space will have to be put into suspended animation so that they never age, otherwise the entire idea of traveling a very long distance in space will never be possible for humanity. This idea of long term space travel and suspended animation is the basic plot of this film and I also believe that no matter how great our technology becomes, there is always the high probability that something will go wrong and in this case its the spaceship getting hit with an asteroid field 30 years into the trip.

There is a major twist after the first 30 minutes of this film that I will not reveal and it is this conflict that provides the main action in the second half of the movie. I also thought that this conflict was a good idea and is also provided a believable story line that supported the original idea of traveling 120 years in space. One problem with this movie will be obvious to anyone who sees it. With mostly two people and one robot played by Micheal Sheen for a whole movie, there has to be a story that fills two hours and at times, the story seemed slow and somewhat boring. I thought that there was enough science fiction and special effects that provided enough of a distraction so that this problem did not ruin the film however. Despite this, Jennifer Lawrence’s character at one point asks Chris Pratt, “so what is there to do on this ship?” I thought that was a telling moment midway through the film. For me, the special effects highlight of the movie was when the ship lost gravity and Lawrence was stuck in a water bubble while swimming in a pool. I have never seen anything quite like this before and I admired the computer technology that made that scene possible.

In the last part of the movie, the actor Lawrence Fishburn makes a surprise appearance as it seems that his suspension pod also failed. His appearance as the Captain of the spaceship provides more insight into what has gone wrong due to his expertise and his security clearances to get to different parts of the ship. At the very end of the movie the actor Andy Garcia makes an appearance and he has no lines in the film at all, which I found rather surprising due to his fame as an actor. Perhaps his lines were cut when the film was released, but despite this, I am surprised he took this very small part.

I give this movie a medium recommendation because of the special effects and the very good idea presented in the story and the acting was overall very solid. Another good movie that is similar to this one is Gravity, which came out in 2013, with even better space travel special effects.

In hindsight after seeing the movie Moonlight, I thought it was a shame that movies about this kind of reality even exist because they depict a world that is the worst example of life in this country. The life of those who are born into squalor, into a horrible and dangerous neighborhood and through no fault of their own have no way to escape a lifetime of hopelessness and misery, is a hard thing to see, much less live through. This movie, which has a very high IMDB rating of 8.7 is about the timeline of the life of a young boy and follows him through his life at home, where his mother is a drug addict and his father is a criminal himself and is mostly absent. What follows is the boy’s life through Grammer school and then high school, where the schools he goes to are in most cases nothing more than havens for criminals and drug pushers. Being born into a life like this, probably has an average lifespan of at least 30 years less than any other neighborhood in this country, as the odds of even living to age 20 are greatly reduced because of random shootings, drug abuse, and murder. As this movie shows so well, your choices are very few, and many people who are born into a depressing world like this try to escape their reality by using drugs or alcohol and in many cases choose a life of crime because they believe their only ways out of this terrible world are sports or being a rapper.

This movie also deals with homosexuality, both with the bullying that goes hand in hand with being suspected as a homosexual and a young man learning to accept the fact that he is gay and going through his first gay experiences and his confusion over trying to figure out who he really is. I thought it was unusual that a movie about living in a ghetto would also include the subject of homosexuality, but this story is very different in every aspect. This movie seems more like a documentary about a very harsh reality and nowhere is there any evidence of acting. It all seemed like I was watching a real life story for the entire two hours. There are also no big name stars in this movie which is another aspect of this film that is highly unusual.

This movie has a high probability of being nominated for an academy award this year and has already been nominated for six Golden Globe awards (see Golden Globes post below). I give this movie a high recommendation.

The attempt this movie tries to make, trying to define the 3 main abstractions of life: the search for love, the desire for more time and the fear of death is extremely ambitious, perhaps too ambitious. One problem with a film like “Collateral Beauty” is no matter how you approach 3 such difficult and abstract subjects as a writer or a director or even an actor, you run the huge risk of sounding like you are preaching your beliefs to other people. All of us, no matter how rich or poor, or fortunate or unfortunate has to reach conclusions and rationalizations about life that work for us and no movie, writer or even religious counselor can reach these conclusions for you. The other ambitious part of this movie is that it has many many twists, turns and symbolism, some of which work and some not only don’t work but make no sense and could be considered absurd.

Will Smith plays Howard, who is the head of an advertising firm in New York and at the start of this movie he is full of life and enthusiasm about his work with this colleagues and business partner played by Edward Norton. The next scene jumps to 3 years later and Howard is a shell of his former self, almost like a zombie barely talking to anyone and building strange structures with dominoes and then knocking them over. The reason for his insane behavior is understandable as we soon learn that his only daughter has died and later in the film we find out that he was divorced because of his daughter’s death and that 79% of all couples divorce after their child has died. Like the recent and great movie “Manchester By The Sea”, also reviewed in this blog, the grief that the character Howard shows in this film is manifested by zombie-like behavior and occasionally lashing out at the world with anger. This part of Will Smith’s acting in this movie works very well and is believable, but what is not believable is the strange scam his 3 friends play on him to not only try to knock him out of his 2 years of depression but also in the process try to save their failing advertising firm. In my opinion, this strange scam his friends play on him is another attempt by a screenwriter to try something new and unique and in the process, an unusual storyline is created that does not work. Why this idea didn’t work for me is that the scam they played to help their friend, comes off as more cruel than helpful and there is no way what they tried to do would ever work in the first place. I have noticed more than a few reviews on the internet about this film are very negative, including the overall score on IMDB at only 5.3 and the very low score on Rotten Tomatoes. In my opinion, the reason why some of the opinions are so low is because so much of what is trying to be unique and innovative in this film comes off as either not making sense, or downright ridiculous.

The ending of this film definitely did surprise me but there is a second surprise ending that for me was another example of something that was illogical and just didn’t make any sense, considering the linear sequence of events that lead to the ending. The problem with screenwriting in recent movies I have seen is that when you try and write something that is new and unique, you run the risk of thinking of things that ultimately in real life just doesn’t make any sense. A much better example of a film trying to deal with horrible grief and the loss of a child is the movie “Manchester by the Sea”, which has no far-fetched story at all and everything is believable. The point here is that, what is run of the mill and real life and perhaps done before in some way, can still be a great movie. It’s OK to be different, but this can be taken too far.

The term “Collateral Beauty” is also never really explained and considering this movie is mostly about the horrible grief following the death of a child, how can anyone preach to notice collateral beauty when being faced with life ending grief. On top of this, the person who talks about collateral beauty at the end of the movie is part of the surprise ending that makes no real logical sense. This second surprise ending is probably one of the several reasons why so many reviews for this movie are bad.

I did not think that this movie was necessarily bad. But because of the many flaws and lack of any logic with so many plot points, this is not a good movie either. At best, this film is average but could have been great if they just cut out the several different insane plot points. The acting is overall good, and includes Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet and
Michael Peña, so it’s a shame there were so many mistakes made in this story. For all of these reasons, I cannot either recommend or completely reject this film.